Transfer of Korean Manner Assimilation to English

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the transfer of manner assimilation phenomena from Korean into English. The data from this study showed that three types of manner assimilation in Korean are not transferred to the same degree. That is, obstruent-nasalization and lateralization were readily carried over to the subjects' interlanguage, while the transfer of liquid-nasalization was noticeably low. Following the positional faithfulness of the syllable onset, liquid-nasalization is considered to be a marked phenomenon. Recent transfer studies have found that phonetically motivated processes, such as obstruent-nasalization and lateralizaiton, are more easily carried over to the target language than the lexically restricted morphophonological processes like liquid-nasalization. This suggests that the reason for the discrepancy in transfer rates lies in the difference of status among the three processes, tempered by a morphophonological rule of avoidance of word-initial liquids, which in turn implies that the syllable contact constraint is not the only reason for manner assimilation in Korean.